STÉPHANE BOYERA, LEAD PROGRAM MANAGER

Stéphane has played an important role in the creation of the World Wide Web Foundation since 2008. In January 2009, he became Program Manager, responsible for the design and implementation of a new Foundation program targeted at leveraging the power of Web technologies to empower people in parts of the world where they need it most. Stéphane is also participating in different experts panel on the topic of Mobile and Social Development, including the World Bank Expert Panel on Mobile for Rural Development, the World Bank Expert Panel on mobile Health, and Vodafone Socio-economic Impact of Mobile (SIM) panel.

Previously, Stéphane joined the World Wide Web Consortium in 1995. Leading the W3C Device Independence Working Group from 2001 until the end of 2005, he was a key participant in the development and launch of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. Stéphane also took part in the management of the Voice and Multimodal Activities. From 2006, he led W3C’s work on the Mobile Web for Social Development, which is looking at how to extend the frontier of the Web to make it relevant, usable and useful for rural communities and under-privileged populations of developing countries. Before W3C and the Web Foundation, he worked in Artificial Intelligence (knowledge acquisition and modeling) at INRIA.

Stéphane graduated from ESSTIN (degree in telecommunications and network engineering), in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

This presentation will give an overview of the so-called ICT for Development (ICTD) domain. We will introduce the history of the domain and present how ICT can support social and economic development (in Africa and India for instance). Then, we will introduce the local context as well as local conditions in which technology is deployed and used, the major classes of problems and research domains in technical and business areas. In particular, we will focus on mobile technologies, voice technologies, and business modeling for scalability and sustainability. On these specific points, we will present the current state of the art, current and evolutions and key research questions. All these points will be illustrated through recent results of Web Foundation driven projects such as VBAT , ForobaBlon and EU-funded VOICES . Finally, the presentation will underline the importance of considering the different technologies as a channel to the Web and not a walled-world forcing all stakeholders to use specific devices and interfaces.